Ulva Island – Tweet, Tweet

Imagine you walk through green forest and elegant fern and you can hear half-dozen different birds singing just for you almost all the time. In the beginning you can’t spot them, but as you walk around your eyes get used to the deep green and your ears track the flutter sounds and there they are: the robins, the wekas, the kakas, the bellbirds…that’s Ulva Island – a little paradise for a lot of native birds that are in danger here in New Zealand. We had to catch a ferry at 9 o’ clock in the morning to do this trip and we made sure that no rat was on board of our boat of cause. The rangers of the doc government department work a lot to help maintain Ulva Island a rat free area. The birds are an easy food source for rats, because they never had natural predators. Therefore they are not afraid and some of them, like the Kiwi, even can’t fly away. It was a wonderful sunny days and after six hours of walking and listing and was really sensitized for background sounds. I don’t hear a lot of background sounds here on Stewart Island either. I mean even in Oban there are almost no cars and definitely no trains or police car sirens or any kind of city sounds that you might think of…just the sea, the ferry and the sea-gulls. On Ulva Island it’s even less than that, because nobody is living there, but a few souls in one single house. Go there is you need silence and if you are a secret photographer by heart. I promise you gonna love it!